Читать книгу ArtBreak - Katherine Ziff - Страница 11

1

Why ArtBreak?

“We make things for the joy of it.”

—Fourth Grader

PLAY IS THE central, universally significant activity of childhood. Self-directed play, in which adults play a supporting rather than a directing role, is critical to the well-being of children. Gary Landreth in Play Therapy: The Art of the Relationship notes that play, essential to the natural development and wholeness of children, is a universal right of children everywhere. But, as Peter Gray presents so compellingly in Free to Learn, as opportunities for play in the United States have disappeared over the last half century, rates of mood and anxiety disorders have risen among children.

Children’s days and nights are scripted and planned for them, and, in attempting to respond to the political imperatives of school reform in America, schools contribute to the restrictions in the lives of children. Homework intrudes into family life. Recess is curtailed to make time to raise standardized test scores or to serve as punishment for children who have misbehaved or failed to turn in their homework. Instruction in the arts is sacrificed to exigencies of budgets. Playtime for children has all but disappeared, and school itself has been documented as a major stressor in their lives.

Yet the research on play tells of its vital benefits. Elise Belknap and Richard Hazler’s article aptly entitled “Empty Playgrounds and Anxious Children” reviews the scientific research documenting the substantial role of play in supporting the development of

• Divergent thinking

• Literacy skills like creating and working with narratives

• Practice with numerical concepts

• Personality characteristics like curiosity, perseverance, self-regulation, optimism, concentration, engagement and motivation

• Prosocial behavior like accommodating and negotiating with others

• Internal locus of control

• Expression of feelings and experiences

• Problem solving, memory, and cognitive flexibility

The relationship between play and learning, in fact, is so strong as to suggest that play is critical to learning. And children can conceive of just about anything, including working with art materials, as an opportunity for play. Through play with material like paints, clay, drawing media, blocks, and cardboard, children begin the work of developing creativity that eventually leads to an ability to produce and modify complex and organized fields.

What is play? Peter Gray in Free to Learn devotes seventeen pages to a definition and gives three general guidelines for explaining play. Play has to do less with an activity itself and more with attitude and motivation. Play can be woven into other activities, bringing a playful attitude to whatever activity in which one is engaged. And “pure” play has five characteristics:

1. It is self-chosen and self-directed.

2. Its means are valued more than the ends.

3. Its structure comes from the minds of those who are playing.

4. It is mentally removed from “real” or “serious” life.

5. It involves an active and non-stressed state of mind.

Doris Bergen developed a taxonomy of play based on the level of self-direction held by the child: Free play is child directed and supports a discovery style of learning; guided play involves an adult contributing support and encouragement. In contrast, directed play and work disguised as play involve an adult as the director and a child as the recipient.

Play also has the potential to create for children positively toned emotions known as “uplifts” that can mitigate both chronic and traumatic stress. Such positive experiences can provide a break from a stressful environment, allow children to experience positive stressors that generate excitement and hope, and promote restorative healing from a stressful event. In school, such a play break can allow a child to return, refreshed, to the classroom better able to engage in academics.

ArtBreak is a choice-based, guided-play experience based on the developmental and restorative possibilities of art making. Our action research documentation for the program tells us that children enjoy and value it, teachers and families appreciate it, and it lowers stress levels for children. It is easy to implement: you can start right away in your classroom or home, at whatever scale suits your space, time, and budget. And no art training is required, only the willingness to embark on a play journey with children. This book is a step-by-step “how to” for creating and facilitating an ArtBreak group for children that meets the needs of your time, space, and budget.

Children flourish when they experience engagement, belonging, and joy. In a working laboratory featuring both freedom and order where their innate curiosity, playfulness, and sociability are guided by their own interests and questions, children are able to find a natural balance. In ArtBreak such a balance is created through a social/emotional framework designed to support community, work, relaxation, problem solving, creativity, and imagination. As schools are working to meet the requirements of new evaluations and assessments, they are asked to also master the delivery of new curricula and encouraged to infuse their classrooms with twenty-first-century skill building: creativity, critical thinking and problem solving, communication, and collaboration. These skills are best learned in an atmosphere that recognizes school as a social-emotional place.

These two worked out how to choose and share a palette to paint one big picture together. Photo by Josh Birnbaum

This book is a practical guide for educators and families who wish to offer children an ArtBreak program grounded in social/emotional learning and based on the restorative possibilities of art making. No art experience or training is needed. You may have picked up this book because the thought of a joyful, productive classroom is compelling. Yet, on the other hand, it sometimes seems impossible. At no time during the last hundred years of public education has so much been expected of schools, teachers, and children. Much of the current American conversation about school reform binds public-education policies to the service of national economic interests, emphasizing children as beings to be shaped to fit an undefined future based on competition. At the same time schools face challenges of every kind—funding, standardized achievement test performance mandates, drop-out rates that approach 50 percent in some demographic groups, political hostility to teachers, achievement gaps, and children deeply affected by environmental stressors such as poverty and trauma and, indeed, the stress imposed by schools themselves.

An ArtBreak program offers children freedom of choice in art making within a community guided by flexibility and individualization, where they are always supported and sometimes guided. In ArtBreak settings children meet weekly for a forty-minute, choice-based art experience throughout the school year. ArtBreak’s organizing framework is the expressive therapies continuum (ETC), a theory from art therapy based on the restorative and creative possibilities of art making. The ETC describes the functions of art materials according to how fluid or resistive they are. Fluid media like watercolor and finger paint support kinesthetic and sensory goals like relaxation and expression of feelings. More resistive media like colored pencils and markers support perceptual and affective goals such as identifying emotions, understanding cause and effect, and creating narratives. Highly resistive media like collage and construction develop problem-solving skills. A creative strand runs through all three levels and can occur at any point along the continuum.

You can conduct an ArtBreak with an entire classroom, with a small group composed of children from different classrooms, or in a home with children of various ages. I have partnered with classroom teachers and worked solo by using a pop-up studio stored in bins, an entire room dedicated to the studio, and a hand-built, sketchbook-based version—in schools as well as in community settings like libraries. Regardless of the setting, ArtBreak groups develop their own personalities yet evolve through common stages. This session, originally published in the Journal of Creativity in Mental Health, illustrates an ArtBreak group in its ninth session in which children are working independently with different media.

Six children, ages five through eleven years, rush into the school counselor’s room and dive into the apron box for smocks. It is time for ArtBreak. Two students head for the back table where their cardboard robots are ready for them; they have been under construction for several weeks now, and today the students would decide to work on the problem of how to create and attach movable arms. A second grader circles the room a time or two before settling on finger paint, choosing glossy paper and a selection of paints and carefully squeezing out globs of paint, while exclaiming over the bright hues and squishy feel of the paint. A fourth grader reaches for her cardboard-and-duct-tape construction and continues to grapple with how she will make a sturdy and meaningful object. Another child walks about the room eyeing paints, boxes of collage materials, and the construction corner stacked with cardboard and other repurposed objects. This child selects a five-gallon plastic jug, mixes tempera paint, and covers the jug with a turquoise and green under-the-seascape. Filling the jug with water makes it hard to handle, so a handful of glass pebbles serves as seawater. A sixth child works carefully on a valentine collage for a sibling. “Where’s the music?” one child shouts. Oops—the counselor forgot to turn it on, and she hits the start button for the jazz CD the group has become accustomed to. The children work steadily for half an hour, talking among themselves and occasionally offering announcements to the group. The counselor moves around the room, supporting problem solving by offering tools, assistance with hole punching, towels when water spills, and a basket of new string and yarn. She occasionally pauses to make notes about what the children are doing and saying. The children try to eke out a few more minutes past the allotted half hour of work time and then help with a whirlwind cleanup. Art is stacked on a rack to dry, and the counselor takes five minutes to write down notes about the group’s process and reminders about materials or room rearrangements needed. Morning ArtBreak ends; the counselor gets the room ready for the rest of the day that will include an afternoon session with a different group.

Researchers have sought to find a causal relationship between students’ participation in the arts and school achievement as measured by grades and test scores since at least the 1980s. After decades of trying to document the claim that arts education transfers to academic (math and reading) learning, some of the leading scholars engaged in this work have concluded that the best way for students to develop math skills, for example, is to study math. Instead, research on arts experiences in schools has refocused on the kinds of outcomes that school-based arts experiences do have. For this reason it is an exciting time to be working with and researching art making in schools. Ellen Winner and her colleagues, for example, have documented eight studio “habits of mind,” or thinking dispositions, taught by visual-arts educators, such as development of craft, engagement and persistence, and ability to reflect, observe, envision and express.

As the ArtBreak groups progressed, we undertook practitioner-based action research to try to fine-tune operations and inform improvements. We also wanted to understand the contribution of the program toward child well-being. Specifically we sought to understand whether the groups mitigated child stress, and whether the groups seemed to support the developmental goals derived from the expressive therapies continuum framework that we incorporated into our referral procedures.

We learned that children relax in ArtBreak. This is apparent when you observe them in the studio, and it is supported by our ArtBreak studio research involving the biological measure of fingertip temperature, a reliable biomarker of stress levels. As a person relaxes, blood vessels in the extremities dilate (vasodilation), blood flows more freely to the hands, and fingertip temperature rises. For two years we measured changes in fingertip temperature among thirty-nine ArtBreak students as they entered the studio and then about two-thirds of the way through the session (before they began to wash their hands and clean up). We found an average increase of +4.6 degrees F while children were engaged in making art during a group session; nearly all students in the program experienced some level of relaxation. Further statistical analysis (t-tests) showed an overall significant increase in temperature. We discussed, but elected not to pursue, an experimental design with a control group, because of the logistical considerations required as well as ethical concerns about diverting children who had been referred to ArtBreak to another intervention. With this in mind, the research, although suggestive, supports the idea that the program reduces child stress.

Mitigation of child stress is important. Traumatic events as well as cumulative chronic stressors from factors like poverty, racism, difficult family circumstances, and school itself take their toll on a child’s psychological and physical health. Schools have the potential to create opportunities for islands of stress reduction throughout the school day, and researchers have noted three kinds of such “stress-buffers.” ArtBreak has the potential to offer all three. Breathers are positive events in the midst of stress that allow a child to take a break and recover. Sustainers are enjoyable challenges that sustain coping and allow a child to notice that positive feelings like optimism can be experienced in the face of stressors like the challenge of problem solving that can occur while making art. Finally, restorers are recuperative healing experiences that follow a stressful event.

Materials developed and collected at various times throughout the program included the facilitator’s reflective notes and journals, the children’s reflective journals, photographs of student work, the children’s verbal responses to questions and prompts about their experience and learning, written teacher assessments, and data created from referral forms.

In terms of our process and perception data, about half of our participants were referred to help them develop pro-social behaviors and understand their own strengths; about a quarter were referred for an opportunity to relax and express their feelings; and a quarter were referred to work on strengthening their problem-solving abilities. About two-thirds of the participants were boys. When we asked teachers about their perceptions of student progress on their individual reasons for referral, about 70 percent of the students were thought to have made gains and 30 percent were thought to have remained the same. This process informed adjustments like extending the session length from thirty to forty minutes, confirmed that the expressive therapies continuum is useful for structuring individual referral goals, helped gain funding for a summer program, and gave us an understanding of how ArtBreak supports children. For practical purposes, documenting provides reflective time and space for a facilitator to attend to group process as well as to create an archive of photographs and notes to use for ArtBreak “progress reports” for families, teachers, and students. Throughout the book you’ll see examples and case accounts that illustrate the ways children progressed.

This child’s expression reflects the words of a fourth-grade boy: “We make things for the joy of it!” Photo by Josh Birnbaum

What follows here are summaries of what we learned about categories of student gains.

JOY AND FUN

Most often children talked about having fun in ArtBreak. Along these lines they also mentioned joy.

“We have fun!”

“We make things for the joy of it!”

EMOTIONAL REGULATION AND SENSORY EXPRESSION

ArtBreak allows children to express their feelings and enjoy a sensory experience. When asked what they have learned, some children talk about feelings and that ArtBreak helps them enter a state of calmness.

“Finger painting feels good; it is awesome and smooth.”

“I learn I have to work calmly in here.”

“If you’re mad, you calm down.”

“It helps me control my anger, because you sit down with me and paint.”

Teachers noted gains in emotional regulation:

“(He) seems very happy and content, not upset if things aren’t ‘just right.’ He has come mega-miles.”

“(He) is better able to work in small-group settings, making less noise and creating fewer distractions. ArtBreak was perfect for him.”

“(She) still can get easily upset, especially when she is disorganized or feels pressure, but I have seen improvements in her ability to calm herself down and try to be more organized.”

The choice-based, child-directed environment and inviting art materials create a support and comfort that children respond to with a relaxation response of increased blood flow to the limbs, which warms their hands, a reliable indicator of stress reduction that we were able to document.

Attending to the nature of lighting and music in the studio contributes to an environment of calmness and warmth. The children themselves are often drawn to choose work that is calming when they need it, and it usually involves fluid media. One year a fourth grader spent most of his time at the sink rinsing paintbrushes that he gathered from the worktable or swishing his hands in a dishpan he had filled with water. This sensory experience was soothing for him and allowed him to return to his classroom relaxed. The next year he began painting, reveling in finger paint and painting his hands with a brush. Sometimes he made prints with his painted hands. In sixth grade he began sewing. Sewing is a highly cognitive activity when it comes to measuring and cutting, but the rhythm and repetition of hand sewing with a running stitch can be quite relaxing. In this way he began, when he was ready, to integrate problem-solving and cognitive processes into his work. Occasionally I have noticed a child who is struggling in frustration with a technical task—fastening boxes together, stringing beads just so, drawing a certain shape—put that work aside to do a little finger painting instead.

SOCIAL SKILLS AND COMMUNITY

Sometimes the main task of an ArtBreak group is to learn to become a working community. With some groups I have had to remind myself of the stages of group process, and that we will get through the norming and storming period, outlined in chapter 2, and reach the working stage. An ArtBreak community develops through the process of making art together.

When working with a small group of boys referred to an ArtBreak group created just for them at the request of the school intervention team because the once-close group of friends had been constantly arguing and fighting, I despaired for several sessions of anything occurring except the flinging of materials and insults. Then the boys all decided they would make knotted and woven necklaces of twine. This was very bad news to me as, although we had a roll of twine, I had no idea how to use it to make complicated necklaces. “Not to worry,” they said. They opened my laptop, searched for and found YouTube instructions, and, arranging themselves in a semicircle around the computer, taught each other how to make macramé jewelry. They razzed each other for being slow to learn and awkward with their fingers, but they determined who was the best at necklace making and demanded that he help them with the tricky parts. For three sessions they sat companionably teaching each other and producing necklaces; this was a turning point for the group from confusion to collaboration and productivity (or, in group process language, from storming to norming), and provided confirmation for me of the power of attending to child-directed learning and group process. Their teachers noticed that their fighting stopped.

During a session early in the year a child used a plastic egg, plastic googly eyes, and a wooden spool to sculpt a little figure with a poignant expression. A bit uncertain socially, she seemed to have made a self-portrait. Through the year she blossomed socially in ArtBreak and extended this experience to her classroom, playing with others at recess and getting herself elected to the student council.

Children talked about the social aspects of ArtBreak:

“We make new friends.”

“We learn to be creative and be a good sport . . . we support each other.”

Teachers commented about gains in social skills:

“He is a natural leader. This can sometimes be a good or not-so-good thing. ArtBreak gave him an opportunity to hone those positive leadership skills.”

“Above all, he benefited most from ArtBreak. He has friends, has been accepted/celebrated for his art abilities, and is, overall, more confident and embraced by his peers.”

“He handled recess better, was able to join in play with others more easily.”

“Every child looked forward to ArtBreak, especially ________. She felt part of a group and gained self-confidence as a result.”

PROBLEM SOLVING AND COGNITIVE SKILLS

I have noticed that children master the technical skills they need to accomplish their purposes in ArtBreak mostly by doing, observing the results, and re-doing. When asked what they learned they talked about skills:

“We learn about tools, what you can make with them, being careful with them.”

“I learned how to make a robot, how to sew.”

“You use your thinking, you think about what you make.”

“If your paint gets kind of dry, you can draw and scratch things in it.”

In How Learning Works, Susan Ambrose and her co-authors describe process tasks for developing self-directed learners. This takes place in ArtBreak through choice and problem-solving questions. The steps are

A third grader who enjoyed constructing animal figures with small boxes found it of great importance to have his projects turn out exactly as he envisioned, and sometimes the scope of his concept was way beyond the spatial-thinking skills of an eight-year-old. I respected his firmness in making his own decisions about designing, measuring, and cutting, holding my tongue (with difficulty) when I was bursting to intervene with corrections. Nevertheless, he persisted, sometimes retreating to a chair outside the door to collect himself when his frustration became too great, but always returning to try again. A child stayed after a group one day to finish painting a collage of a snowman on a huge sheet of blue paper ornamented at the bottom with pink paper and duct tape. When he finished he stood close to me and told me quietly: “My parents are amazed that I make these things. They say, ‘How did you make this?’ And I get out stuff and I show them.”

Problem solving the construction of a doorknocker for a cardboard house takes ingenuity. Photo by Josh Birnbaum

Community art making supports collaborative problem solving. Some children choose to work in teams. Two first-grade boys in an ArtBreak group began working together, first as a collaboration when one recruited the other when he needed help building a long communication device using cardboard tubes and tape. They continued this partnership through the year, and as they were in the same classroom they sometimes planned their work in advance. One day they came in and announced: “Today we will paint,” and then asked, “What will we paint?” I encouraged them to look around and see what they would like to paint. Together they discovered two Styrofoam cubes and attached them with tape. On their own they donned smocks and prepared a palette of yellow, blue, and red paint—three inviting pools of primary color. First, they made a lime green and gave the cubes their first coat. We exclaimed over the beauty of this green and I had to hold back to keep from urging them to leave some of that color when they added red. But the joy of red prevailed and the cubes turned a khaki color.

The boys painted and painted and noticed that they could carve their names in the cubes and reveal the lime green. They painted right back over the etched green letters, and then it was time to go. “Who would take the cubes home, taped together as they were?” they asked each other. They asked if I would use my mat knife to cut the tape. This was done and they found flat boxes for each wet cube. That afternoon I spotted them carefully carrying the painted cubes out of the school to the bus. Another year a sixth-grade boy came to my room for help in solving a friendship problem. After we finished that work he sat back and mused about the ArtBreak group he had participated with in fourth grade, remembering things long forgotten by me. “Do you remember how William (a boy two years his senior) helped me? We made Mario figures together. He showed me about the clay.”

A teacher-educator visited our studio and noted, “I was impressed with their confidence and persistence in trying various ways to present their ideas.” Because children are naturally eager to bring their ideas into form, if they are confident in their use of materials and their ability to ask for and receive help, they will tackle all kinds of problems. Here is a list of a few problems and questions engaged in ArtBreak sessions:

How to make a sturdy airplane wing?

What does a dragon look like?

How to cover cardboard tubes with pink color?

How to reinforce cardboard to make a tunnel?

How to paint a picture of a seashell?

How to attach a handmade flag to a pole?

How to get artwork home safely?

What is the best material for robot fingers?

What might best be used for a robot brain?

How to tie a strong knot that does not come undone?

How to make working doors in a cardboard Barbie house?

How to attach a cardboard tube to a cardboard box?

What does a flute look like?

What to do if I do not like my painting?

How to make a retractable light saber?

Can pink be for boys too?

What’s the best way to make a trap that works?

How many stars are on the American flag?

How to make a skirt?

Play is a learning language for children. This child has made toy binoculars to play with. Photo by Josh Birnbaum

IMAGINATION AND SELF-DIRECTION

A sixth-grade boy, when asked to describe ArtBreak, gave us this nugget of wisdom about choice, a condition that allows creativity to flourish: “We aren’t directed. Your mind is not in a can.” Another student offered: “We don’t get told what to do, what to make. We have ideas.”

The ArtBreak framework creates conditions that allow imagination and imaginative play to flourish. I learned this early on when I could not understand the source of the children’s enthusiasm about making things. In 1977, social worker and philosopher Edith Cobb wrote that a child engages imagination and creativity “through the controlled poise of his own body, through the sense and vision of his own hands moving pieces of his world into structure and pattern.” During a session in which children were making lots of cardboard objects (drums, dolls, small vehicles), hurrying to finish so that they might take them home, I asked, “What do you do with them at home?” The children put down their scissors and tape and cardboard, looked at me in disbelieving pity and chorused: “We play with them!” Of course, they were making toys! And they were incredulous that I could not recognize what they were doing. Absorbed in spontaneous mental images of things they wanted to play with, and inspired by the materials at hand, they were completely engaged in bringing their creative visions into form.

Relatedness with others grows from an environment that supports working together. Photo by Josh Birnbaum

ArtBreak creates school engagement in part by offering fun. The idea of fun and joy as a companion to learning and well-being is enjoying a revival, though fun can be a suspect notion in schools. I felt that our work bordered on frivolous, and even stopped writing down how children continually describe ArtBreak as “Fun!” until I read research on the learning benefits of fun. Fun creates engagement, meaning, purpose, and joy. Neurologist and classroom teacher Judy Willis argues “The truth is that when joy and comfort are scrubbed from the classroom . . . students’ brains are distanced from effective information processing and long-term memory storage.” Edith Cobb wrote that a sense of wonder, manifested as joy and surprise, is a prerogative of childhood and essential to the development of creative thinking. Martin Seligman, pioneer of positive psychology, believes positive emotions like fun are an essential part of happiness and well-being. And any kindergarten teacher can tell you that fun, or engagement in meaningful activity, creates joyful, happy classrooms and productive work groups.

Children participating in an ArtBreak talked about imagination and engagement:

“ArtBreak is when you can express your’ magination.”

“I watch the clock all day, waiting for 2:30. That’s when I get to go to ArtBreak.”

Imaginative play, fun, joy, choice, competence in problem solving, and belonging to a community are all linked with school engagement. Researchers Ming-Te Wang and Jacquelynne Eccles conceptualize engagement as behavioral (positive conduct and involvement in school tasks), emotional (positive reactions to school activities), and cognitive (willingness to exert necessary learning efforts). Engagement is created by a school context that supports children’s needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness to others. ArtBreak is designed with all three needs in mind.

A TRAUMA-SENSITIVE SCHOOL CULTURE

ArtBreak supports a trauma-sensitive school culture. According to the American Psychological Association about half of children in the United States experience some kind of trauma, usually beginning in early childhood. Most recover, but a substantial number do not, with poverty a significant risk factor for both exposure and recovery. The Massachusetts Advocates for Children publication, Helping Traumatized Children Learn, provides an overview of the nature of childhood trauma and what schools might do to help. ArtBreak provides many of the things needed by children who have suffered trauma in order to thrive in schools. These include the opportunity to:

• move into a state of calmness from an alarm state

Example: An eight-year-old, frantic because his father had been arrested the previous night, left a session calm after spending a half hour absorbed in art making.

• develop a sense of empowerment via choices

Example: A child from a homeless family, delighted to learn that she had free choice of a rich variety of materials to bring her ideas into form, worked to build an elaborate dollhouse to her own specifications.

• practice using language to articulate needs and feelings and to problem solve

Example: ArtBreak participants are encouraged to ask for what they need from each other and from the facilitator.

• learn about cause and effect relationships and recognize their own ability to affect what happens

• learn to attend to a task at hand, in a safe and predictable environment

• practice regulating emotions

Example: A child who began the year screaming and throwing materials when frustrated with the outcome of his work learned to manage his feelings so that by year’s end he could step away for a few minutes and then return to try again.

• practice executive functions like setting a goal, anticipating consequences, and carrying out plans

Example: Construction projects, including sewing, support cognitive executive functions and require planning. Having decided to make a playhouse, a child made a sketch of what she had in mind, prepared a list of materials, thought through different ways to create doors and windows, and, through problem solving, made a door knocker in order to complete her project.

• learn these things in an environment in which they are not publicly labeled and featured as “traumatized” or “abused”

Example: Children are not gathered into ArtBreak groups by mental health diagnoses or behavioral goals. Goals and functions of the expressive therapies continuum guide referrals, and groups are formed mostly to align with schedules rather than grade level or age.

ACADEMIC ALIGNMENT

ArtBreak is particularly aligned with mathematics skills, fitting well within such standards of mathematical practice as

• making sense of problems and persevering in solving them

Example: A child finds a way to make movable arms and legs for a robot.

• using appropriate tools strategically

Example: The participants measure and mark with rulers, use tape measures, use awls and brass fasteners, and punch holes strategically with a hand-held hole punch.

• attending to precision

Example: The students calculate fabric yardage, find midpoints on objects, cut cardboard to exactly form a box lid, design a fastener, and design a pattern for a three-dimensional box.

• looking for and making use of structure

Example: A child figures out how to make a wearable table.

• constructing viable arguments and critiquing the reasoning of others, at the elementary level elucidated as constructing arguments using concrete referents such as objects, drawings, diagrams, and actions

Example: A student wanted to build a “hideout” and presented a diagram and a written plan supporting his request for two really large cardboard boxes.

ArtBreak’s foundation is built on cardboard, paper, tape, paint, ribbons and strings, repurposed materials, and lots of ornamental doodads all chosen and organized with regard to the framework of the expressive therapies continuum. Its studio is a community of freedom and order that encourages expressiveness, problem solving, and creativity. The next chapter details the workings of the expressive therapies continuum and other elements of ArtBreak’s creative framework.